It strikes me that if one wants to become a naturalist about the function of the brain, maybe there should be a discipline of “anti-meditation,” where you practice holding on to the notion that the screen-watching-self is a fiction, and expanding your sense of self to include the operations of the brain that make up what you are despite being no more individually conscious than a cell is a human.
The Buddhist teachings include the “three marks of existence” which are “Anicca” (pronounced [ah-NEE-cha], almost always translated as “Impermanence”; everything with a beginning has an end), “Dukkha” ([DOO-ka], usually translated as “suffering”, maybe a closer English language equivalent is “stress”; no experience can really be deeply and permanently satisfying), and “Anatta” ([AH-nah-tah], usually translated as “non-self” or “no-self” or “not-self”; this is an observation of the non-personal nature of experience). The closest to what you are describing is probably anatta/non-self. When experiencing non-self, the boundaries between “me” and “not me” can seem to become less defined or disappear altogether. Using the screen/watcher model can be a step toward that experience as you move more and more of your experience from the watcher to the screen until you realize there simply isn’t anybody there watching, just experience unfolding. That’s pretty advanced stuff, tho. I’ve only had a few small glimpses of anatta after meditating pretty often for the last three years or so.
If you’re interested, you can find talks from a number of excellent teachers on this topic at dharmaSeed.org[link to search results]. I generally find Mark Nunberg to give particularly accessible talks for some reason. He’s conveniently just given a series on anatta, so at the time of this comment he’s right at the top of the results.
Definitely sounds similar, thanks for the details. Not sure if I’ll bother to delve into buddhism here, so I’ll just ask—do you know if there’s an even more direct analogue where you do the “motion” of anatta, but without first identifying your self with the watching self? So you’d notice how the patterns and abilities that make up what appears to be the watching self are already parts of the thought-generating self, without de-identifying yourself with the thought-generating self.
I don’t think doing this would change your cognitive habits very much (compared to exercising your brain to change which thoughts get generated), so maybe it’s not a thing.
The first is to first spend time getting into the state where you de-identify with your thoughts, emotions, etc., and experience yourself as just observing them. This has the advantage that it lets you reduce the experience of there being a distinct acausal “doer” in the brain, as you see thought processes just emerging on their own, as opposed to “you” somehow willing them into existence. But as you point out, it has the issue that it still maintains the experience of a separate “observer”.
The meditation teacher Michael Taft calls this “the observer trap” in that a lot of people get stuck at this point. His recommendation is that once you get to this point, use similar techniques that you used for deconstructing the doer, for deconstructing the observer:
Many traditions—especially mindfulness meditation—encourage you to observe your sensory experience in a neutral manner. Observe your breathing, observe emotions, observe thoughts, and so on, without reacting to them. This observer technique works really well because it gives you something like an outside perspective on your own experience. You can watch your own mind, your reactions, your emotions, your behavior almost from the perspective of another person, and that is tremendously useful feedback to have. It leads to equanimity, and the tremendous personal growth that mindfulness advocates are always talking about.
Taking this observer stance is so useful, in fact, that many teachers stop there and do not talk about the next important step in spiritual development. But there is a hidden problem with the observer technique, which becomes obvious once you think about it. Who is the observer? Who is this person who is behind the binoculars, watching your experience from the outside? This neutral observer you’ve created over time is actually just another—albeit smaller and less neurotic—version of the ego. It’s the sense of being a person who is doing the meditating. You could also call it a meditator ego or an observer ego. Creating this neutral observer is very useful, but the goal of meditation is not to create a new meditator ego, it’s to see through the illusion of the ego entirely.
It is quite common for even very dedicated students in observation-based traditions to get stuck in observer mode forever. I have seen it over and over in my experience. Being the observer, a neutral meditator ego, is not such a bad place to be; certainly it is much preferable to the unconscious, robotic mode of life lived without any self-reflection. However, it impedes all deeper progress toward real awakening. So the only way forward is to let go of the observer ego; to release the sense of being a person who is doing a meditation.
For example, spiritual philosopher Ken Wilber tells the story of his first awakening. It happened at a Zen retreat, in which he was in a deep state of observing his own experience. The Zen master said to him, “The [observer] is the last stand of the ego.” Wilber says that “something snapped” inside him then, and he was plunged into a deep state of awakening. He had let go of the observer ego, of being a meditator, and instead had become the activity of meditation itself. His story is not so unusual on the path of awakening. It can happen in many ways.
The second approach are techniques which, rather than going through the process of first creating a sense of a detached observer to identify with, attempt to more directly get into the realization of there being neither an observer nor a doer. These come in at least two different subtypes that I’m aware of.
The first subtype involves practices that aim to get you into a state of “doing but nondoing”. Some of this would take quite a few words to describe, but a simple example are flow states. The sense of self tends to disappear in flow states, so that one experiences oneself as just the activity itself. There are practices which are intended to nudge the mind into something that resembles a flow state, so that the subsystem in the brain that generates the experience of there being a separate observer homunculus gets temporarily turned off. This helps one see that it was actually a constructed experience all along.
The second subtype involves practices where one pays attention to what that sensation of seeing the world feels like, in a way that draws attention to it actually being just a sensation that is added on top of the raw data. I personally like this one:
Look at an object in front of you. Spend a moment simply examining its features.
Become aware of the sensation of being someone who is looking at this object. While letting your attention rest on the object, try to notice what this sensation of being someone who is looking at the object feels like. Does it have a location, shape, or feel?
(leaving some space for people to try this out themselves before reading about my experience with it)
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When I do this kind of exercise, a result that I may get is that there is the sight of the object, and then a pattern of tension behind my eyes. Something about the pattern of tension feels like “me”—when I feel that “I am looking at a plant in front of me”, this could be broken down to “there is a tension in my consciousness, it feels like the tension is what’s looking at the plant, and that tension feels like me”.
Obviously “I” cannot be just a feeling of tension, so this practice helps draw attention to the fact that I normally identify with a random sensation in my consciousness, but that sensation is actually nothing special. If I want to identify with something in particular, I might as well identify with the whole content of my consciousness.
All of these approaches have the potential to produce cognitive shifts in how your machinery of identification works, so that you can get closer to being able to experience both the observer and the doer as fictions.
The usual move the teachers suggest is to imagine the mind as the sky with thoughts and feelings and sensations as clouds floating through it. You don’t have to get involved with the clouds, just watch as they grow and change and float on by. Let them be. You could also use the ocean or a river if you like waves and eddies and fishes better than clouds. I like the ocean, myself, because the waves on the shore analogue pretty well with the breath (the breath is the standard meditation anchor, though you could actually use any sensation).
Another move would be to imagine the whole of experience as taking place on a stage, with each of the “sense doors” (sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch, thought) as an actor. The role of attention itself becomes more obvious here (maybe use a spotlight if you like concrete images), but it’s a step back toward the movie/viewer metaphor. Come to that, tho, I’ve never heard a teacher talk about an audience...
As for changing cognitive habits, the effect is something like taking things less personally; stuff just unfolds and you can choose to get involved or not.
In my experience, even a little taste of anatta has helped me to better notice—and take more advantage of—the space between impulse and action. I’ve found that skill to be extremely beneficial, even at what I assume to be the lowest levels!
My imaginary naturalist discipline should avoid this usual thing, though, because if you want to imagine the function of your own brain in materialist detail, you can’t be imagining “you” as something that can be uninvolved with your thoughts and feelings, or as something separate from the rest of your mind that watches what’s going on. Instead, you have to be primed to imagine “you” as something emergent from the thoughts and feelings—if any watching is done, it’s thoughts and feelings watching themselves. A play where the audience is the actors.
As I understand it, the sense of self eventually vanishes entirely, leaving only the immediate psycho/physiological phenomena that “know themselves”, whatever that means. ;)
I pattern match this to the Buddhist idea of interdependence, where what you are is reliant on the environment and the environment is reliant on you (or embedded agency).
It strikes me that if one wants to become a naturalist about the function of the brain, maybe there should be a discipline of “anti-meditation,” where you practice holding on to the notion that the screen-watching-self is a fiction, and expanding your sense of self to include the operations of the brain that make up what you are despite being no more individually conscious than a cell is a human.
The Buddhist teachings include the “three marks of existence” which are “Anicca” (pronounced [ah-NEE-cha], almost always translated as “Impermanence”; everything with a beginning has an end), “Dukkha” ([DOO-ka], usually translated as “suffering”, maybe a closer English language equivalent is “stress”; no experience can really be deeply and permanently satisfying), and “Anatta” ([AH-nah-tah], usually translated as “non-self” or “no-self” or “not-self”; this is an observation of the non-personal nature of experience). The closest to what you are describing is probably anatta/non-self. When experiencing non-self, the boundaries between “me” and “not me” can seem to become less defined or disappear altogether. Using the screen/watcher model can be a step toward that experience as you move more and more of your experience from the watcher to the screen until you realize there simply isn’t anybody there watching, just experience unfolding. That’s pretty advanced stuff, tho. I’ve only had a few small glimpses of anatta after meditating pretty often for the last three years or so.
If you’re interested, you can find talks from a number of excellent teachers on this topic at dharmaSeed.org [link to search results]. I generally find Mark Nunberg to give particularly accessible talks for some reason. He’s conveniently just given a series on anatta, so at the time of this comment he’s right at the top of the results.
Definitely sounds similar, thanks for the details. Not sure if I’ll bother to delve into buddhism here, so I’ll just ask—do you know if there’s an even more direct analogue where you do the “motion” of anatta, but without first identifying your self with the watching self? So you’d notice how the patterns and abilities that make up what appears to be the watching self are already parts of the thought-generating self, without de-identifying yourself with the thought-generating self.
I don’t think doing this would change your cognitive habits very much (compared to exercising your brain to change which thoughts get generated), so maybe it’s not a thing.
There are at least two different approaches.
The first is to first spend time getting into the state where you de-identify with your thoughts, emotions, etc., and experience yourself as just observing them. This has the advantage that it lets you reduce the experience of there being a distinct acausal “doer” in the brain, as you see thought processes just emerging on their own, as opposed to “you” somehow willing them into existence. But as you point out, it has the issue that it still maintains the experience of a separate “observer”.
The meditation teacher Michael Taft calls this “the observer trap” in that a lot of people get stuck at this point. His recommendation is that once you get to this point, use similar techniques that you used for deconstructing the doer, for deconstructing the observer:
The second approach are techniques which, rather than going through the process of first creating a sense of a detached observer to identify with, attempt to more directly get into the realization of there being neither an observer nor a doer. These come in at least two different subtypes that I’m aware of.
The first subtype involves practices that aim to get you into a state of “doing but nondoing”. Some of this would take quite a few words to describe, but a simple example are flow states. The sense of self tends to disappear in flow states, so that one experiences oneself as just the activity itself. There are practices which are intended to nudge the mind into something that resembles a flow state, so that the subsystem in the brain that generates the experience of there being a separate observer homunculus gets temporarily turned off. This helps one see that it was actually a constructed experience all along.
The second subtype involves practices where one pays attention to what that sensation of seeing the world feels like, in a way that draws attention to it actually being just a sensation that is added on top of the raw data. I personally like this one:
Look at an object in front of you. Spend a moment simply examining its features.
Become aware of the sensation of being someone who is looking at this object. While letting your attention rest on the object, try to notice what this sensation of being someone who is looking at the object feels like. Does it have a location, shape, or feel?
(leaving some space for people to try this out themselves before reading about my experience with it)
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
When I do this kind of exercise, a result that I may get is that there is the sight of the object, and then a pattern of tension behind my eyes. Something about the pattern of tension feels like “me”—when I feel that “I am looking at a plant in front of me”, this could be broken down to “there is a tension in my consciousness, it feels like the tension is what’s looking at the plant, and that tension feels like me”.
Obviously “I” cannot be just a feeling of tension, so this practice helps draw attention to the fact that I normally identify with a random sensation in my consciousness, but that sensation is actually nothing special. If I want to identify with something in particular, I might as well identify with the whole content of my consciousness.
All of these approaches have the potential to produce cognitive shifts in how your machinery of identification works, so that you can get closer to being able to experience both the observer and the doer as fictions.
The usual move the teachers suggest is to imagine the mind as the sky with thoughts and feelings and sensations as clouds floating through it. You don’t have to get involved with the clouds, just watch as they grow and change and float on by. Let them be. You could also use the ocean or a river if you like waves and eddies and fishes better than clouds. I like the ocean, myself, because the waves on the shore analogue pretty well with the breath (the breath is the standard meditation anchor, though you could actually use any sensation).
Another move would be to imagine the whole of experience as taking place on a stage, with each of the “sense doors” (sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch, thought) as an actor. The role of attention itself becomes more obvious here (maybe use a spotlight if you like concrete images), but it’s a step back toward the movie/viewer metaphor. Come to that, tho, I’ve never heard a teacher talk about an audience...
As for changing cognitive habits, the effect is something like taking things less personally; stuff just unfolds and you can choose to get involved or not.
In my experience, even a little taste of anatta has helped me to better notice—and take more advantage of—the space between impulse and action. I’ve found that skill to be extremely beneficial, even at what I assume to be the lowest levels!
My imaginary naturalist discipline should avoid this usual thing, though, because if you want to imagine the function of your own brain in materialist detail, you can’t be imagining “you” as something that can be uninvolved with your thoughts and feelings, or as something separate from the rest of your mind that watches what’s going on. Instead, you have to be primed to imagine “you” as something emergent from the thoughts and feelings—if any watching is done, it’s thoughts and feelings watching themselves. A play where the audience is the actors.
As I understand it, the sense of self eventually vanishes entirely, leaving only the immediate psycho/physiological phenomena that “know themselves”, whatever that means. ;)
I pattern match this to the Buddhist idea of interdependence, where what you are is reliant on the environment and the environment is reliant on you (or embedded agency).